A ringfort, or rath, once occupied a slight rise about 350 metres east of the Awbeg River near Velvetstown in north Cork. Ringforts are the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, circular enclosures typically defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch, or fosse, that once served as farmsteads during the early medieval period. This one measured roughly 35 metres across, substantial enough to have been mapped clearly. Today, walking across the field, you would find no trace of it at all.

Ordnance Survey maps tell a reasonably clear story of its gradual fading from the record. The 1842 and 1906 six-inch maps both mark a circular enclosure of around 35 metres in diameter. By the 1937 edition, surveyors depicted it with hachures, the small lines used to indicate raised ground, showing a circular mound of about 30 metres enclosed by a fosse. At some point between that survey and the mid-twentieth century, the decision was made to remove it entirely. Local information places the levelling at around 1956, when the land was in tillage. What the plough and earth-moving equipment left behind was, to the eye on the ground, simply a field. Only aerial photography has recovered any outline, with the fosse showing as a cropmark, a faint discolouration in the growing crop caused by differential moisture in the soil above the filled ditch, visible in photographs held by the Cambridge Aerial Survey Archive Programme.